Cigar Box Banjo Read online

  So: we take our equipment out of the motorized orange metal box and set it up on the stage. The stage is, of course, too small, but this particular one is also higher than most, maybe three feet off the ground, and the risers are off to the side. This adds a power-lifting element to the Naugahyde pumping, and the stale air is redolent with our huffs and puffs, grunts and farts, the screeching sound of muscle fibre ripping apart. Then I attend to my bass amplifier, Joe and Tony to their guitars. George constructs his wall of keyboard, and Martin sets up the drums.

  We search for power. We are like the first generation of robots in this. The first generation of robots was designed to scoot down university hallways, metal arms extended like babies searching for breasts to suckle. When their optical equipment landed on electrical outlets, they would plug in, charging up with enough juice to power their next foray.

  Then we wait for the sound guy. He has to run cables and set up microphones before the sound check, which has to be completed, as I’ve said, preferably in silence, before five o’clock. No one is really surprised—we’ve met our fair share of sound guys—when he shows up a little after six. He apologizes and launches into an explanation that seems overly complicated. The sound guy throws around first names like we should know who the players in the story are. He says never mind about Mel, Mel’s full of shit—

  “Hey, Mel! You’re full of shit!”

  “You guys are full of shit!”

  Oh well, now we’ve inadvertently thrown in our lot with the sound guy, but we don’t care. You know why? We’ve been working on our tab.

  Indeed, by this time our collective bar tab has achieved the heft of any old indenture. Soon we will be owing them money, soon we will be paying out of our pockets in order to take the stage. But we are all muzzy, and afternoon beer drinking often makes the outside world seem sunnier. We don’t care if Mel hates us, and we don’t care if we’re late with sound check and must perforce alarm the diners. There’s precious little food to be seen, anyway; a few more people have come to drink. Men wrap big hammy fingers around beer glasses. Women poke at their mixed drinks with plastic straws.

  The sound guy is slender to the point of emaciation. He evidently needs a cigarette in his mouth in order to breathe. If unadulterated oxygen were to enter his lungs, it might overload his system, flood him out, something like that. He works with great care and attention. If he were to wire the sound imperfectly—plug the lead vocal mic into channel 2 as opposed to 1—life as we know it would presumably come to an end. So it is approximately eight o’clock when we begin sound check.3

  Here’s how sound checks go. The sound guy takes his position behind the board, which is usually some distance from the stage, typically at the back of the room, so that the sound guy can gauge how the music is inhabiting the space. He starts playing with the knobs on the board. A roaring squall of feedback announces that he is ready to proceed. The band senselessly takes to the stage. “Senselessly” on two counts: that roaring squall of feedback was very intense, and we know full well that the majority of us will not be needed for a long while, because the first thing that happens is the sound guy says, “Okay, the kick.” There is sometimes a talk-back system, so that the sound man’s voice issues forth from the monitors, but in the kind of clubs we play, that is rare. Mostly the sound guy just says, “Okay, the kick,” and we don’t hear him (because he’s in the back of the room), and then he gets mad and shouts, “Kick!”

  Kick=bass drum. The big drum that used to be strapped on and belly-borne. Remember good old Haywire Mac back there on the street corner in Spokane? I hope you pictured him smacking at that drum with a mallet. In a modern drum kit, the mallet is worked by the drummer’s foot. He flattens a pedal, and a system of levers and springs drives the mallet against the drum skin. That’s why it’s called “the kick.”

  “Okay, the kick.”

  Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

  I was, in my little transcription there, tempted to fool around with type and font size to indicate that the sound guy transforms the sound of the bass drum by adjusting his knobs. But in all my years as a musician, I have never really heard the difference between the first bass thwock and the last, which happens, on average, about ten minutes later.

  “Okay, floor tom.”

  . . .

  “Floor tom!”

  Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

  The rest of us stand around while this is going on, smoking cigarettes, working on our tab. Occasionally, boredom drives us to sneak up the volume on our amps, softly stroke out a riff.

  “Just the floor tom, please!”

  Eventually it registers on the bar’s patrons that, for the past while, a loud thwock has been sounding in their brains. Perhaps at first they dismissed it as symptomatic of a hangover. Then they realized they were still drunk, so what the fawk is with this thwock? They start to get nasty, which is why Mel wanted to accomplish all this early and quietly. “What the fawk?” they holler.

  “Rack toms.”

  . . .

  “Rack toms!”

  “What the fawk?”

  Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

  Eventually—really, eventually—the drum kit has been sound-checked. Then it’s time for the bass. I turn up my amp, fiddle with the knobs on the amp and the instrument itself, place my fingers on the strings and produce a low E, the great fundament of rock’n’roll.

  “Okay, good. Keyboards.”

  Perhaps I exaggerate, but sound guys do really spend most of their time with the drums, which pisses me off as both a former bass player and a fellow whose brain has been thwocked repeatedly. Indeed, I’d often catch a glimpse of myself in the future, sitting at a small round table in the shadows of some licensed establishment, nursing a beer and a shot of whisky, minding my own business, when . . .

  Thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock thwock.

  “What the fawk?!” I would roar.

  Sound check completed, we must attempt to eat dinner in the twelve minutes remaining before our scheduled start time of nine o’clock. There is some agreement with management that gives us a break on our food, but that only adds to our collective indenture.

  Finally, we take to the stage—this both confuses and angers the patrons, who thought, gratefully, that we had abandoned it moments before—and begin our set. Our opening number is something lively and up-tempo—“My Imagination and Me,” sometimes, or “More Cold Drinks”—and people don’t know what to make of it. When the music ends, it’s obvious that the notion of applause has never entered their minds. They simply stare forward, too stunned to even blink. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe calls out. Deciding that they’ve been suitably warmed up, he launches into “Eva B,” the song with the goose-stepping Hitler impersonation.

  We’ve got a four-set contract—four forty-minute sets, separated by twenty-minute breaks. The break between the third and the fourth set is always a lot longer than twenty minutes, and we take to the stage clutching beer and shot glasses to our chests. Between songs we demand, over the PA system, to know if we’ve missed last call, and when the bartender shouts it out (by now it’s the gregarious and philosophical Night Guy, Frank), Joe orders from the stage on our behalf, a massive order which, over time, has evolved into this telling and eloquent phrase: “The top shelf in a pail.”

  Over the course of the evening, young people have ventured in, and by midnight the place is crawling with ’em, young people who hear in Joe’s music the plaintive love song of the circ
us geek, the anthem of the addled. When we play our last song—“Nos Hablos Telefonos”—they roar with approval. They respond to the final cha-cha-cha by lurching to their feet, clapping their hands together with rhythmic precision, or at least with concentration, because by this point in the evening no one in the joint could clap their hands properly, certainly never to the satisfaction of any law enforcement official delivering a roadside sobriety test.

  Then it’s time for the after-party. This is rarely anything organized, although we can count on a bespectacled fellow sidling up to the band and asking, “Did anybody want to get stoned?”

  Of course we did! That is what our group is all about: music, starting tabs, and getting stoned.

  IN THOSE days, a typical club date was a week long, Monday through Saturday, leaving Sunday available for travel to the next town. The crowds would grow exponentially—through word of mouth, sometimes a mention in an entertainment column, very occasionally a review—and the weekend could be a little bit crazy. A little bit crazy, as in, you would wake up not knowing where you were, who that was, or what your foot was covered with.

  This all takes its toll, spiritually. I can be more precise. After five years of this sort of thing, my spirit was about the size of a postage stamp. Just a regular little stamp for local mail. Martin and I had kept our duo going, and very often when Joe Hall and the Continental Drift had a week off, Quarrington/Worthy played a club date. Once, Joe and the boys left us in Ottawa. The band had played downstairs, in the “rock room,” and now Marty and I were playing upstairs in the same establishment, where there was a softer music policy. The music policy might have been softer, but the drugs weren’t, and of course Martin and I were always quite partial to the drink. Once a young woman asked us, “Are you guys Baha’i?”

  The girl’s boyfriend rolled his eyes. “Just ’cause they sound like Seals and Crofts doesn’t means they’re Baha’i.”

  But she was persistent. “Are you guys Baha’i?”

  “No,” answered Martin. “We’re B’drunk.”

  Neither of my musical careers was doing very well. Promise called to us from a great distance, like the sirens singing to sailors. One of the songs from our Quarrington/ Worthy album was actually a number one hit. That should have an asterisk—a number one hit*—just like Roger Maris’s tainted record. A periodical called RPM, the official organ of Canada’s music industry, had a number of charts rating songs that played on various formats. Our song, “Baby and the Blues,” was—for one week and one week only—at the top of the AOR chart. AOR meant “adult-oriented,” which I suspect translated as “the people listening to these radio stations, even if they absolutely hate a song, are too weak and infirm to get out of bed to change the station.” Still, Marty and I knocked none less than Kenny Rogers from that lofty height, along with his little song “The Gambler.” But Quarrington/ Worthy was toppled, after a mere seven days, from the top rung by “Babe,” as performed by Styx. And we didn’t merely slip to number two, there to feint and parry at Dennis De Young and his cohorts; we plummeted and were never heard of again.

  As for Joe Hall and the Continental Drift, we began to suspect there was something within Joe that simply didn’t want commercial success. Here’s the kind of thing that raised such suspicions. We were in Vancouver, playing a very nice club, the name of which escapes me, and someone had managed to convince a group of musical muck-mucks to come. There were a couple of A&R guys from major labels, big booking agents, a journalist from a reputable magazine, and they all sat together at a big table right in front of the stage.

  The show began. Joe was filled with more manic energy than usual, and that was going some. He blistered through a couple of songs, and then he leapt off the stage, bent over, and grabbed the tablecloth on the big table with his teeth. He straightened out, spreading his arms as though inviting crucifixion. Most of the muck-mucks ended up with high-priced liquor pooling in their laps, except for the A&R guys. A&R guys are almost always former musicians, so they had plucked their drinks out of mid-air.

  “Well,” we thought, “this is going well.”

  Martin and I had drinks the following day at Hotel Europa, an establishment shaped like a big wedge of cheese. It was near where we were staying, the Dominion, in Gas-town. These days Hotel Europa is a heritage building, and Gastown is “historic.” Even the Dominion is “historic.” When we stayed there, it was just one of many cheap hotels. We used to refer to its “rooms designed with the smoker in mind,” because the most prominent furnishing, beyond the bed and an ancient night table, was an ashtray. It was in these cheap hotel rooms that I began writing my novels. I performed a little trick Joe Hall had showed me, taking out the night table’s top drawer, overturning it, and shoving it partially back onto the runners so that it functioned as a crude desk. I would then take my typewriter out of its case and set it down. It was a sturdy machine rendered from gun metal, and looked as if it had been taken behind enemy lines many times by its former owner, an alcoholic war correspondent. I would bang on the keys quickly, desperately; I could almost hear bullets and buzz-bombs slicing through the air above me.

  So Martin and I had drinks at the Hotel Europa, and we chatted for a while and discussed the travails of the Toronto Maple Leafs. (Which, as I’ve said, were much fewer back then.)

  “Know what?” I asked. “I’ve had it.”

  Martin nodded. “Me too.”

  1 It’s difficult to find a four-string bass these days. They have at least five strings, sometimes six, and I am baffled by them. I was never much of a bass player anyway, forever unable to slap and pluck in a soulful, funky manner.

  2 I knew you’d be looking down here. Kirby was a television co-host, mostly, back in the fifties and sixties. He was on The Garry Moore Show, and I believe he also sat beside Allen Funt on Candid Camera.

  3 But we don’t care. We started a bar tab!

  CHAPTER 9

  SO THEN,” as I put it later in my song “Gotta Love a Train,” “my life had to happen.”

  “ I’m talking about the part of my life that happened well away from music, years spent pretty happily banging away at the writer’s trade. I wrote novels, books of non-fiction. For a few years, my living was made mostly by writing screenplays— some of which were produced. If I’d been playing closer attention, it might have occurred to me that I was causing many fine actors to take up musical instruments. Bridget Fonda spent hours strumming a guitar, Jessica Tandy bowed a violin, Billy Dee Williams learned to play jazzy intervals on the piano. A young actor named Michael Mahonen became quite a fine trumpet player. What I’m getting at is, my thoughts were never all that far away from music, although I wrote no songs. I had plenty to occupy myself, I guess, what with my daughters, Carson and Flannery. I did make up a little ditty, “The Red Balloon,” which I sang to lull Carson off to sleep, until such time as she forbade me, with a great and petulant adamancy, from singing that song anymore.

  It falls far outside the themes of this particular book, but I don’t think I’ll have another chance to tell the following story, so if you’ll indulge me: I was involved with a movie entitled Camilla, written by me (based on a story by my friend Alison Jennings) and directed by Deepa Mehta. One of the film’s stars was Hume Cronyn. Actually, the film didn’t exactly star Mr. Cronyn, he had a smaller part, so he spent most of the day in his trailer, and I used to visit. I was eager to hear stories about Tennessee Williams. (Cronyn had started a theatrical troupe in order to perform the one-acts of the then-unknown writer.) It was necessary for me to introduce myself every day. “Hello, I’m Paul, I’m the writer,” I would announce, and Hume would shake my hand and allow as it was nice to meet me.

  Just prior to the first day of principal photography, when all the actors had gathered in Toronto, there was a “table read.” Everyone clustered around a big table with scripts in their hands, saying the words I’d written, and this particular big table was in a fancy hotel downtown. Anyway—I’ll switch to the historical p
resent now, the tense of many a fine anecdote— I’m walking across the lobby when I spot Gordie Howe sitting on one of the sofas. Mr. Hockey, alone and unattended. I approach him to say hello, and we chat briefly. “I’m waiting for Beliveau,” he tells me. “We’re going to make a commercial together.” I am tempted to join Howe in his waiting for Beliveau, but I really should get upstairs for the table read, plus, I am a Maple Leafs fan, and Jean Beliveau is the Dark Overlord of the Montreal Canadiens–style iniquity. So I offer my copy of the shooting script and ask for an autograph. In a schoolboyish hand, he writes, “Best wishes, Gordon Howe.” I am tempted to ask him to have another bash at it. He is not “Gordon” Howe. But I am late, so I rush upstairs and see the table read is in progress. I wonder who might be interested in my new treasure, Gordon Howe’s autograph. I look at Bridget Fonda, wonder if she might be interested. Of course, I know she wouldn’t be, but I like looking at her. Likewise with Ms. Tandy, whose skin has a luminous quality, like oyster shell. I consider a couple of other actors. There is Elias Koteas, who is brilliant and therefore a wee bit scary. There is Maury Chaykin, who is a friend of mine, as he portrayed Desmond Howl in the film version of my novel Whale Music. But I do not think hockey is played on whatever planet Maury is from. So my eyes light on Hume Cronyn, and I think, “Hmm. He’s Canadian.” (Mr. Cronyn was born in London, Ontario. His father was a Member of Parliament and his mother was née Labatt, an heiress to the brewing fortune.) So I sidle in beside him, and at an appropriate pause in the proceedings (perhaps at a moment when everybody should be laughing at the witty dialogue, only nobody is), I shove the script and autograph toward him. He reads the inscription, and his eyebrows ascend his brow. “Hmm. Gordie Howe, eh?” Then the eyebrows descend quickly, with much consternation. “He’s not still playing, is he?”

  All right—back to where I left off a few paragraphs above. In 1996, my wife gave me a CD entitled Ten Easy Pieces, songs written and performed by Jimmy Webb. I received it on Christmas morning, nodded appreciatively, and thanked Dorothy.